Source-linked AI summary
Science vs Conspiracy: collective narratives in the age of (mis)information
Alessandro Bessi, Mauro Coletto, George Alexandru Davidescu, Antonio Scala, Guido Caldarelli, Walter Quattrociocchi
TL;DR
The paper asks how distinct scientific and alternative narratives organize information consumption and interaction on Facebook. It analyzes public Facebook pages and user actions, then tests responses to 4,709 deliberately false troll posts. It finds distinct narrative-based communities, with alternative-news consumers more focused on their content and more likely to interact with troll posts, while scientific-news consumers comment more on alternative news.
Problem
The paper examines how online communities consume and interact with information supporting distinct narratives amid widespread misinformation and uncertainty about informed public debate.
Method
The study analyzes public Facebook pages, posts, likes, shares, and comments, labels users polarized by a 95% interaction threshold, and tests responses to 4,709 satirical conspiracy-style posts.
Results
Distinct communities organize around shared narratives: alternative-news users are more focused on their community, scientific-news users comment more on conspiracy pages, and alternative-news users dominate interactions with troll posts.
Takeaways & Limitations
The findings show that communities organized around shared narratives retain different interaction patterns even when confronted with deliberately false and satirical content.
Takeaways & Limitations
The analysis uses only publicly available Facebook data, excluding users whose privacy restrictions prevent their content from being collected.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
The large availability of user provided contents on online social media facilitates people aggregation around common interests, worldviews and narratives. However, in spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called {\em wisdom of crowds}, unsubstantiated rumors -- as alternative explanation to main stream versions of complex phenomena -- find on the Web a natural medium for their dissemination. In this work we study, on a sample of 1.2 million of individuals, how information related to very distinct narratives -- i.e. main stream scientific and alternative news -- are consumed on Facebook. Through a thorough quantitative analysis, we show that distinct communities with similar information consumption patterns emerge around distinctive narratives. Moreover, consumers of alternative news (mainly conspiracy theories) result to be more focused on their contents, while scientific news consumers are more prone to comment on alternative news. We conclude our analysis testing the response of this social system to 4709 troll information -- i.e. parodistic imitation of alternative and conspiracy theories. We find that, despite the false and satirical vein of news, usual consumers of conspiracy news are the most prone to interact with them.
Introduction
The paper examines how Facebook users organize around scientific and alternative narratives amid increasing information complexity and misinformation. It finds distinct consumption communities and different interaction patterns, including stronger engagement with conspiracy content and substantial interaction with deliberately false troll posts.
- Motivation: The study addresses how online narratives shape information consumption, community formation, and public debate amid increasingly abundant and heterogeneous content.The motivation includes concern that viral false rumors may influence public opinion before correction.
- Study focus: The analysis constructs a Facebook atlas of scientific and alternative information sources in the Italian context.Alternative sources include conspiracy-oriented explanations that may reject scientific evidence.
- Study focus: The dataset contains 271,296 posts from 73 Facebook pages classified as conspiracy or scientific news.Conspiracy news are defined as alternative explanations of reality that diffuse content neglected by mainstream information.
- Interaction patterns: Polarized alternative-news users focus more on their community and are more oriented toward liking and sharing conspiracy posts, while scientific-news users comment more on conspiracy pages.Polarized users are identified when 95% of their likes target one page category.
- Response to false information: Among 4,709 satirical conspiracy-style posts, 80.86% of likes and 77.92% of comments came from usual consumers of alternative stories.These percentages refer respectively to 3,888 users labeled by likes and 3,959 labeled by comments.
Methods
The methods use publicly available Facebook data collected from public pages over a four-year period. The dataset breakdown covers alternative and scientific news pages, posts, comments, and likes.
- Data collection: Data collection used the publicly available Facebook Graph API and public data, excluding users whose privacy restrictions made their content unavailable.The pages were public Facebook entities, and user contributions were available only when permitted by privacy settings.
- Data collection: The dataset comprises 73 public pages divided between scientific and conspiracist news, with posts and user interactions collected from 2010 to 2014.The collected interactions include comments and likes, alongside the posts themselves.
- Data collection: Table 1 breaks down the Facebook dataset by alternative and scientific news and reports counts for pages, posts, comments, and likes.
Results and discussion
Scientific and alternative news attract distinct communities, yet their broad consumption patterns are similar. Alternative-news users interact more within their community, while scientific-news users comment more on alternative posts; conspiracy-oriented users also engage most with troll content.
- Consumption patterns on scientific and alternative news: Posts from scientific and alternative news are consumed similarly in terms of likes, comments, and shares.Their post-lifetime distributions are also comparable, approximating similar user attention spans.
- Consumption patterns on scientific and alternative news: Alternative-news posts receive more likes and shares, indicating a stronger user orientation toward dissemination.The comparison is based on correlations among likes, comments, and shares for posts in the two categories.
- Detecting information-based communities: Modularity-based community detection identifies distinct information-based communities, with denser same-community interaction on the conspiracy side.The analysis uses a user–page bipartite network and applies multi-level and maximum-modularity approaches.
- Polarized users and their interaction patterns: 99.08% of conspiracy-polarized users’ comments remain within their community, whereas science-polarized users are slightly more active outside it.Polarized users are classified by a 95% like-activity threshold across the two page categories.
- Polarized users and their interaction patterns: 13,603 comments from science-polarized users targeted alternative-news posts, compared with 5,954 comments from alternative-news users targeting scientific posts.These correspond to 9.71% and 0.92% of the respective groups’ total commenting activity across 7,751 cross-community posts.
- Polarized users and their interaction patterns: Conspiracy-page users were more active in liking and commenting on troll posts, while polarized users generally retained their established interaction patterns.The troll-post sample contained 4,709 satirical items, extending the comparison beyond ordinary news consumption.
Conclusions
The study finds that users organize into communities around distinct narratives and display different cross-category interaction patterns. It also identifies conspiracy-news users as especially active in responding to parodistic false claims.
- Conspiracy-news users’ interactions are more oriented toward diffusing news, whereas scientific-news users are more prone to comment on conspiracy pages.
- 4709 parodistic false claims elicited the greatest activity from polarized users of conspiracy pages.
- Users organize into communities around shared narratives, with conspiracy-news users more focused on their own community’s posts.
- The observed audience preferences suggest the possibility of designing communication strategies to contrast and immunize unsubstantiated narratives.